Episode 767 | Finding Your ICP, Prioritizing Feature Requests, Pricing, and More Product-Focused Listener Questions

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to Startups For the Rest Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and this week Brendan Fortune returns to the show and we answer questions focused on product management. We talk a lot about identifying and focusing on your ideal customer profile, how to prioritize feature requests, some dangers around using tools to prioritize feature requests, how to think about pricing and more listener questions, focus on product. Before we dive in to the questions, we are raising Fund three for TinySeed. We are investing in ambitious SaaS Bootstrappers. We’ve made 192 investments to date, and fund three is slated to invest in well over a hundred B2B SaaS founders over the next few years. Tiny c.com/invest. If you are interested in indexing your investment across a lot of different B2B SaaS companies that we identify through our application process and we identify as being high velocity and as companies having a high chance of succeeding and providing an amazing return for investors. 

So if you’re an accredited investor or the equivalent of that in your country, you do not have to be US based to invest. Head to TinySeed dot com slash invest. And finally, MicroConf Mastermind applications are open now and they close on March 31st. That’s at MicroConf masterminds.com. If you want to get matched up in a peer group of other ambitious B2B SaaS founders that are looking to travel a similar trajectory to you, and some will be ahead of you, some will be behind you, but frankly, we spend a lot of time to match those that are around the same stage as you. And where we think that a small group of you, four or five, maybe six of you in a mastermind, will be able to provide a ton of value to one another. MicroConf masterminds.com. And with that, let’s dive into listener questions with Brendan Fortune. 

Brendan Fortune, welcome back to Startups For the Rest Of Us, Mr. Walling, nice to be here. You are last on our show in episode 756, why Great Product Management is Critical for your startup. And in that episode, I did a call for questions for product related questions and did we ever get some questions? I think we got too many to answer in a single episode. I think we got almost a dozen. And I want to thank tom@garagetoolapp.com as well as Kyle Marr for sending these questions in. I sent ’em all to you and you handpicked the ones that you felt like would apply to the most people and would be most helpful for the audience. So thanks for doing that.  

Brendan Fortune:
Yeah, I’m excited to get  

Rob Walling:
Going on these. Let’s dive into the first one. So our first question is, it sounds like from the podcast that your ideal customer should be your highest paying customer. Does your ideal customer need to be the one that pays me the most? What if it’s someone that is easiest to work with, most responsive gives me the best feedback, but isn’t necessarily the highest paying customer? What do you think?  

Brendan Fortune:
Yeah, this is such a great question. The ideal customer does not need to be your highest paying one, but if your ideal customer is not in your, let’s say, top 20% of paying customers, it’ll be very important to understand why. The SaaS business model really depends on two things, retention and expansion. And if you can get both right, you unlock this magic of compound growth. And that’s really what makes saso special. Just as an example, so customer io where I work, only a couple percent of customers churn each month, which means there’s about 98%, 99% customer retention each month. And of those greater than 60% expand their profile count each month. And in customer io, we charge based on profile count. So when they add profiles to the system, they pay customer IO a bit more each month. So the combination of keeping these customers month over month and them growing is what unlocks this compound growth. 

So when you’re thinking about your ideal customer, one of the things to do rather than just jumping to the highest paying, although I think that’s a good shortcut, is you could look for your oldest customer that’s retention. So someone who’s really stuck around and gotten value out of your platform for a while, and you want to combine that with the oldest customer that has also grown their usage of your system the most. So whatever the key actions are, key behaviors that you want to see, you want to see not only that they’ve been around with you for a long time, but also that they’re using you consistently and ideally more and more each month. And those customers, if you’re pricing right, are almost always going to be some of your highest paying. They’ll also often be some of your most responsive because they’re getting value out of your platform. 

They’ve got questions, they’ve got feedback, they want you to improve certain things. They’re probably not going to be the easiest to work with though because they’ll be pushing the boundaries of your system, whether that’s missing capabilities or features, whether that’s the performance, if you’ve got really a high data processing type of product, drip is a good example of that or both at the same time. So look for the ideal customer again and the ones that have been around the longest and have used your product more and more and more over time. That’d be my pitch.  

Rob Walling:
And finding NICP is harder than it sounds. I remember with the Drip and I would say in the early days, but even in the mid days, the later days, there were several different ideal customer profiles. Now, drip is a pretty horizontal tool, right? An ESP marketing automation provider, however you want to classify it. And there were bloggers with these massive lists that would come in and pay a load of money. Problem was is they kind of went to the tool du jour. And so they switched, the switching cost for them was very low because they didn’t build deep automations, really weren’t that technical. And so really what they kind of needed was a newsletter service with some email sequence. This is a pretty light use case, but they paid us a lot of money. And so at a certain point they were a pretty key component of the drip customer base, but as time went on, they were less and less and less and we actually focused less on building features for them. 

Frankly, they just didn’t need the complicated features. SaaS companies were interesting because they did need the complicated features, but to your point, man, they pushed the envelope of everything because they tied into the APIs and they did all types of crazy, I say crazy. It was just what they needed to really communicate well with their customers. Very complicated setups and SaaS customers list sizes are way smaller than bloggers. You get a blogger, we had a blogger with a million emails, rarely did I see a SaaS company with even a hundred thousand emails. That would be a lot, right? 50,000 was more the size and since pricing is based on subscriber account, that’s what we were thinking about. And then what was the other one? Well, e-commerce became a thing even before there was the pivot, right? As I was leaving, they pivoted into e-commerce. We did no marketing into e-commerce. 

We did not even have a Shopify integration and 15% of our customers were e-commerce. And I don’t really know why I didn’t really have reach into e-com, but they came in and I remember their use case being a little different, but Infomarketers actually, and I’m separating those from bloggers may have been the best customers because they tended to, I’d say build bigger lists, maybe not as big as Bloggers is definitely bigger than SaaS. They really needed the components and they locked into our integrations are selling things, and so they needed either that Stripe or the PayPal or the Send Owl or the Gum Road or some type of lightweight cart. These are carts back in the day, I don’t know if Sendal is still around, but these were a lot of the integrations and they I think pushed the platform in a more healthy way that a lot of people could use versus we had some SaaS founders and I guess some info marketers who pushed it to the point where Derek and I kept building things for them. 

But at a certain point I remember being like, why did we build all these super power user features? Like Brennan Dunn, the co-founder of Write Messages, he wanted a full on JavaScript console in, he wanted to write the workflows in JavaScript or markdown or something. And I remember being like, that’s an interesting idea that absolutely one person will use. And so the reason I’m saying all this is you and I can talk about ICP and say, man, you should really find one ICP. It’s not always that easy. And there were, again, everything’s a bell curve, there’s always a spectrum. And I felt like there were Venn diagram overlap or there’s something where bloggers were not our number one ICP, but they were number four for a while and they actually paid the bills for quite a long time. They had these big lists. So I guess all that, that’s my color commentary on this. What do you think about that and how does that translate to larger companies? Let’s say I’m doing 50 million a year as a SaaS. Do I have one ICP or am I adding more over time?  

Brendan Fortune:
Yeah, I think there are almost always multiple ICPs and then there’s one priority. That’s the definition of priorities. You can only have one, at least one at the top. It’s so interesting to hear you talk back on these ICPs for drip though, because even I want to take a minute and play them back on this retention and expansion framework. So the bloggers for example, they are maybe a little bit lower on the retention side, like you said, because switching costs are down. But on the expansion side, they’re high because they’re going to be adding way more people to their list, which is how you charge. So you got one of the elements, but you don’t have both. On the SaaS side, the retention’s going to be really good, and integrations are such a key part of retention strategies for a lot of SaaS products, especially when you have to put in a custom integration, which was part of Drip’s deal, certainly part of customer iOS as well, where there’s an API integration in addition to maybe a Shopify or WooCommerce or something else. 

So you’ve got the retention angle there, but then you’re missing a little bit of that expansion with the SaaS companies and stuff. And ideally you want to try and find someone that’s going to be a little bit of both. And there are some customers, like the info marketer is maybe a little bit of a balance of both because the retention might be a little higher, not because necessarily of their integration. So that could be part of it, but it’s because of the complexity of the workflows and the automations that they might build out. And Brennan Dunn is the ultimate example of that, and he really pushed drip to its limits. So I totally agree with that. And I think when you’re looking at different ICPs, the focus is less on which one should I just go all in on and instead, what’s the stack ranking that I want to put them in based on this combination again, of retention and expansion. 

And it’s rare when it’s just obvious, well, okay, of course we’ll just do this. So you do end up having to focus a little bit on multiple. So that makes a ton of sense. And I think as you get, as company sizes increase as you’re making more and more money, oftentimes what happens is at some point someone will sit down and be like, okay, we need to make personas and personas become a little bit of a shortcut for an ICP. Sometimes they become, I dunno, kind of more of a mental exercise than a practical exercise because people get so obsessed with who’s the buyer? Wait, who’s the user? Who are we going to pick for pictures? All sorts of stuff. But at the end of the day, if you can connect it back to expansion and retention, I think it all boils down to that. And even as companies grow, you have to find who you’re going to prioritize, even if it is more than one ICP.  

Rob Walling:
One other thing I want to add to this before we move to the next question, and it is there’s a third element. It’s not just retention and expansion, although you could lump this into expansion, but I’m going to argue that it shouldn’t be and it’s promotion or spreading the word. And here’s the thing, if you have a bunch of infomarketers or bloggers using your tool and you’ve set up an affiliate program and they like your tool and you pay ’em 20 or 30% top line, they will likely get you hundreds or thousands of customers. Like if you work hard at this and this is your focus and you do webinars with ’em and you push, it’s the playbook that ClickFunnel said, it’s the playbook that lead pages did. I’ve seen it over and over. If instead you focused on SaaS founders, they do not give a shit about affiliate commissions. 

They don’t have an audience, it’s not the same thing. So there’s a third element that is not present in most customer bases to be honest, which is why you’re not bringing it up because it’s probably 5% of potential SaaS apps have this ability, maybe 10%. It’s a very super minority, but if that’s on your radar, you can absolutely grow very quickly, often in an unhealthy way. I’ll say, I often giving away a huge amount of your net margin and often the promotion is to nascent entrepreneurs. Early stage kind of wannapreneurs is the derogatory term for it. And so the churn is really high. But man, I have seen the internals of a business that went, what did it do? I think it was end of year one, two and a half million a RR, and this was basically mostly bootstrapped end of year, two 5 million, end of year, three 10 million, end of year four 20 million. And it was on the back of this. And so it’s an interesting thing. It’s not something I’ve ever executed on, but I have seen it. I’ve seen it both, I’ll say secondhand and third hand through both TinySeed companies and other companies I’ve been involved in.  

Brendan Fortune:
So it’s like the third angle of acquisition. There we go. That’s maybe where I’d play that. And if you can get the, as long as again, the acquisition falls out the leaky bucket, if you don’t have the retention piece of it, which can be the risk and you called that out too, but yeah, that’s a total fair point. If you’ve got a Venn diagram of three things between retention, expansion and acquisition, in a perfect world you get all three. But that’s not very common at all. But yeah, that’s a totally fair point. And I think a lot of, especially like you were saying, that early stage where you’re trying to get some sort of traction, you’re trying to bring a lot of customers in the door, if you’ve got an opportunity to go after that, then do it.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. And as I said, it may not be the right decision long term. It may not be the healthiest business. You’ll have higher churn than you think, and it doesn’t happen by itself. You don’t just say, Hey, an affiliate program and I have a bunch of bloggers, is that No, you, you have to. I’ll just say I’ll use Expression Wine and dine, but you have to do enterprise sales basically with them to get them to start recommending you. And there’s a whole conversation and stuff. So it’s not as simple as I’m making it sound, but it is a tactic that I’ve seen. 

I want to take a minute to let you know about the MicroConf Growth Retreat, a new event we’re launching in London from May 14th to the 16th of 2025. This isn’t your average conference, we’re keeping it intimate with just 40 to 60 SaaS founders joining us for deep networking and invaluable insights. We’ll have focused morning work sessions where you’ll gain clarity on your business challenges followed by unforgettable afternoon excursions, exploring the best of London, and then we’ll end each night with a reception. Tickets are limited, so head over to MicroConf dot com slash retreat to secure your spot. We will sell this event out. If you want to go to the MicroConf retreat in London, head to MicroConf dot com slash retreat. Let’s dive into our next question. How do you prioritize features slash product requests? Right now I’m doing it based on if multiple customers ask for a feature that would be high priority, along with if a feature is already on our backlog, things I felt that would’ve been a good feature. And then if a customer asked for it, is there a better way? Right now we have about 10 customers, so finding a common denominator in feature requests isn’t always easy. What do you think, sir?  

Brendan Fortune:
So I would amend the last sentence and say, it’s never easy. Even if you’ve got a hundred or a thousand customers, it’s still going to be, this is one of the hardest things to do and this is what a great product manager really, I dunno about solves for you that’s maybe too simple but really accelerates for you and kind of improves your hit rate when it comes to prioritization. So first off, I think you can go deep down a rabbit hole on this question and lots and lots of people have tried to create different equations frameworks for figuring out exactly how you do it. There’s the rice framework, which they’re all fine, they all kind of do similar sort of things, which is try to pick a few elements that are important to your business and then rank things based on them. And that can be a really smart mental exercise as you’re trying to find your flywheel. 

And that is one of my going to be my broken record thing. I know we talked about that in the last episode with pricing and packaging, but the flywheel is your strategy. It’s the thing that you want to prioritize, feature requests that accelerate, that flywheel. All that said, when you’re just getting started, I think the risk that I have seen is more inaction, sporadic action. So kind of just moving all over the place, prioritizing different things that are solving different types of problems. So I’d recommend just a simple prioritization framework like this, pain versus ease one that’s been around for forever if something is really high pain. So when I hear in this question a customer asks for a feature that would be high priority, make an assumption that high priority is also high pain for the customer. They cannot get their job done without this thing. 

That’d be very, very high pain. And if it’s high pain and low effort, which does sometimes happen, then just do it. Don’t think too hard about it, just get it done. If it is something that is a high paying, high effort sort of thing, and this could be like let’s say you had some sort of e-commerce payment product and someone came in and was like, I really need a whole website, e-commerce delivery platform and I want to be able to customize this and that and the other thing, basically an adjacent market expansion that’s going to be really high payment and also really high effort. And in that case you want to slow down and take a look at how you think that will impact your core SaaS metrics around expansion, churn, customer acquisition. And if the answer is it’s not much, I’m not really very certain, you should not do it. 

If you’re not really sure, then take some time maybe a week and spike it out. But I wouldn’t put more than into it or at least that would be my pitch. Moving down the framework. If it’s a low pain, low effort thing, then do it, but try not to do too many of them. There’s the temptation sometimes to only do these things because you see the problem, you understand the problem and you understand the solutions. So you just kind of churn these out and if you do that, you’re going to lose out on the growth potential basically of your business. And then if it’s low pain and high effort, then obviously drop it. And I think, Rob, you had a great example with the Brennan Dunn JavaScript workflow generator, super cool kind of low pain, but definitely higher effort to maintain and troubleshoot and quality control and all that stuff. 

So in those cases, drop it and move on. The other common question that comes up is like, well, does it depend on who asks for a feature if they’re like a high paying customer, if they’re my ICP or whatever? In general, we’ve been talking about you always want to prioritize who you think is the customer that’s going to bring your business toward its goals. But even in that case, I think there’s a little bit of art to this experience, especially early on when you’re trying to try out different flywheels, different patterns of customer behavior that are both good for your customers and good for your business. I think that a lot of flexibility is key as long as you have some sort of learning that comes out of shipping stuff. If you ship the thing and then you can actually answer questions like, Hey, this got used, this didn’t get used. Here’s who used it, did they continue using it? Stuff like that. Then I think your risk is really low of overthinking. Just try and learn.  

Rob Walling:
You’ve outlined the science of product management, the buckets, the low paying, low effort, high paying high, that’s the science of it. The art is when a feature request comes through, which bucket do I put it in? And that’s the thing that I want to communicate to people there is you cannot a hundred percent make these decisions with data. 

It just surveys or asking or there’s always some gut feel, some classification, some ask ai or frankly it’s in my head and that’s like the founders I see who are building products that people want. They develop this sense of their customer, who they’re focused on what they might need. I remember having conversations, we get a feature request and just kind of asking openly like, ah, this is an interesting feature. What percentage of our customer base do we think would actually use this if we rolled it out? And none of us knew, but I remember sometimes being like, my gut is it’s 5%. And so I think to me that’s a relatively, even if it’s high paying, it’s just a low adoption. So I would throw that out or sometimes it’d be like, I bet at least 20 30% of our customer base would do it, which is that felt significant or even 50 or whatever. 

And again, was I completely right? Probably not. Was I right a hundred percent of the time? Probably not. Was I close enough of the time? You don’t have to be right all the time. So that’s the thing I want to call out with this is it is such the cliche that it’s part art, part science, but it is, yes. But I like the science aspect that you’re throwing out of just having, especially early on having these four, it’s basically four buckets, right? Because a two by two matrix and then you can add more stuff later. And that’s where in the early days it’s hard. You don’t know who your ICP is yet, and you’re kind of have a hypothesis. This is also why I believe horizontal SaaS is so much harder. If you’re building Sewell, Ruben Gomez has, it’s a competitor to DocuSign, horizontal electronic signature. 

Can he possibly have one ICP? Probably not. Versus if I’m vertical, I know there’s, let’s look at Jim desk, which is software for gyms, martial arts, dojos, fitness studios, yoga centers and such. It’s just easier. And at that point, yes, of course you’re going to get some gyms with five locations or 20 locations. You’re going to get single location gyms and you’re going to get ones with this much revenue, ones that don’t have a subscription. I don’t know. There’s all things, and you do have to narrow it down, but the number of options for an ICP is much smaller when you are in a vertical, and that is something we see across tiny C companies is that they tend to, there’s less competition frankly in not horizontal markets. And there’s I think a slightly easier time honing in on an ICP.  

Brendan Fortune:
Yeah, that’s pretty, that’s interesting. Do you think when you’re balancing the art and the science, what do you think has been most successful for you when it’s building that product sense? That’s what I kind of hear with the art piece. I have thoughts on this, but I’m curious for yours.  

Rob Walling:
I think it’s a couple things. I think it is having some type of ideal customer or two or three. I mean, I’ll be honest, with Drip it was, I always thought of bloggers, SaaS, infomarketers as these three buckets and as it went on, and then E-commerce became one, and then bloggers we kind of bailed on because it was like there is not great customers for us, but I had those in my head and I, there was a prototypical one or two of each of those that was a real customer that kind of had you, you know what I mean? And I can name them here, they’re in my head, but I’m not going to name them. And I would think, would they use this? Is this kind of, so I did have personas, but they were just real people I think floating around in my head. 

So that was something, and it was knowing our customers pretty dang well. And then there was this other thing, man, it was like product vision, does this fit with what I want to build? There were times where we got requests to add a CRM to drop a lot, and I remember Derek and I wrestling with this and be like, is that where we want to go? Active campaign has that and Infusionsoft would changes name to keep had that. Is that really the business we’re in? Or do we think we can get to tens of millions of dollars without adding A CRM? Because by the time we had a CRM, we are heading down this dangerous road of we’re going to have two mediocre products attached to each other. I mean inevitably. 

And so that was our vision collectively was like, I don’t think we want to do that. If we do that, we are going all in on that. And then I only want people who need a CRM in drip. I don’t want people who, again, they don’t need A CRM. So would almost be turning our back on them and saying, if you need Drip plus A CRM, then now you’re our ICP. And I never felt like that was the right call. So that’s why tying that vision, product vision of seeing where we want to go and where we want to be in the market and what market we want to be in and who we want to compete with was really the thing. So those are my thoughts. How about you?  

Brendan Fortune:
Well, I think the specificity is so useful that you’re talking through. And I agree a lot of the times, especially early on, the more customers that you talk with deeply, so not just like a random one-off or like, oh, I’ve got one email, but you’ve actually had conversations with them, had lunch with them even or something that’s a little bit deeper. The more you can drive them into your head, the more you develop this product sense. And I think that is a superpower of most founders is if you can be more in touch with your customers, more intimately involved with them, you develop that product sense a whole lot faster than if you’re a product manager, for example, coming into a bigger company that’s just trying to develop that same thing. And that is why I think it’s a little bit easier to develop products that customers love when you are more intimately involved with those customers. 

And it’s because again, your product sense or the art is a little better when you talk about the product vision stuff. What I love about that is there’s a little bit of combo of art and science that’s just really inherent there. The way you were talking through it, you were like, well, we’re going to spread ourselves too thin and quality is part of our vision. We’d rather be best at one thing than okay at two things. And that is more of a, I don’t even know about product sense. Maybe that’s more of a business sense thing developed over trying different ideas, different startups and things like that. But the reason I ask that question is because along my career sometimes I’ve found it really hard to follow exactly what does that mean if I want to develop this art, is that like a nature thing or is that a nurture thing? And I still think it’s a little bit of both, but I think a lot of it is nurture. That’s why the power of curiosity is so great, I think as a product manager or as a founder is because then again, you’ll develop this sense which you need in order to balance making decisions quickly with making the right decisions on priorities. So I basically wholeheartedly agree.  

Rob Walling:
Alright, let’s dive into our third question. Brendan talked a lot about pricing and not leaving money on the table, but what if your competitors pricing does leave money on the table? For example, we charge for user, well, one of our competitors lets you have unlimited users for a fixed price. Ooh, that’s kind of rough. That competitor is probably making a mistake. So the question is how do you compete against that?  

Brendan Fortune:
Yeah, such another great question and I think the core answer, which is a little bit, can be a little bit frustrating, is you want to compete on value, not on price. Okay, so what does value mean? Value is the reason that your customers are paying you. It’s the job that you are helping them perform or just doing entirely for them. And if you can keep the focus on how well you’re going to deliver that value, then you’re going to be able to compete even if the prices don’t match up. So instead of having it be like an apples to apples comparison where it’s just so tempting to go just based on price, you make it an apples versus oranges sort of comparison by focusing on the value of your product. And this really is a psychological exercise which can make it challenging, not a technical one. 

And some questions to think about are what is the sales pitch that earns you customers if you’re talking with someone, but what is the pattern? What is the story that you end up telling where you can see a little light bulb like click oh, now I’m actually interested in this. Now I’m going to lean in a little bit more. So that’s going to get you closer to understanding the value that you’re providing. Same thing with learning from your customers through their feedback about why they stay with you, what are they doing with your product and what are the kind of requests they’re making. All that kind of stuff helps you understand your value and if you can figure out the right story, stories, sell and prices help has been my experience. I’ve even seen really impressive product managers, founders, and certainly salespeople sell future roadmaps over the current value and just blast through some of the pricing conversation. 

Again, it depends on your ICP and how price sensitive they are, but I’ve seen that work really well. Now to this specific question, when you’re doing usage-based pricing, which can be user-based pricing as well, and you’re competing against some sort of all in fixed price, two things come to mind. One, you’re competing against simplicity, which is a hard thing. Customers just being like, I get this. I feel like it’s simple, I feel like I can predict it, but a common way around it and customer I has done this is you start a little bit less expensive than where they’re at with users and maybe that continues for a while as they kind of build up their usage with your product. But if you find a good fit with that customer, you’re going to end up with higher margins, you’re going to end up more expensive. But the difference is you’re going to have proved your value out to the customer and they’re going to be happy to pay for it because they understand the value. Whereas upfront, it’s a little bit harder to do that. So if you can start a little bit cheaper, I think that’s a fair way to compete with someone who is trying to go all in.  

Rob Walling:
Something I like about what you said is basically if you’re undifferentiated, you become a commodity. And if you are a commodity and you are competing on price, good luck. Don’t do that. It’s basically like if you’ve listened to this show for any length of time, I will frequently ask people, especially when I’m challenging them about their product, how are you different? How are you different? How are you different? If you’re the same as anything else, then you compete on price and that’s it. I have a section in my book SaaS Playbook called How Can I Build a Moat? And I talk about network effects of integrations. I talk about building a strong brand. Brand can be bullshit, but frankly, the larger you get, the more it matters, right? When you’re doing 10 million a year and they’re like, I know I’m going to go with customer.io over X, Y, Z competitor because the brand is stronger. 

I talk about a switching costs and some other things. I’m trying to think if I’ve ever competed on price ever with any product, probably some commodity stuff I had years and years ago like pre drip and even pre hit tail because like MicroConf itself, it ticket to MicroConf is more expensive than most startup conferences. But guess what? We sell out every event. Why do you think that is? When someone could buy a ticket for half the price to go to another event because MicroConf has a strong brand, there is trust that we are going to deliver. With Drip, we used to get, oh, you’re 20%, 30% more than MailChimp. And so we would say, great, if MailChimp has what you need, you should go with MailChimp. But guess what they don’t have. We had the whole visual builder, we had all this stuff. If you need this, we are way cheaper than any other competitor. 

And that’s how we positioned ourselves. Even today, TinySeed itself is not the cheapest money that you can raise. And I’ve seen this ad on Instagram, well, it’s being copied by a bunch of things, but it’s for socks or for pens or for whatever. And there’s this one for this sock company and it says, these socks are not cheap because they’re not cheap. It’s not cheap to make a sock that lasts four times longer than cotton. It’s not cheap to create a marina wool that blah, blah, blah. So they’re leaning into why they’re expensive. And so we were batting this around. I like these types of things where it’s like this counterintuitive approach and I put it in the TinySeed team, slack and Alex, who is our program director for the accelerator just wrote this out for TinySeed and he wrote, our funding isn’t cheap because we’re not cheap. 

It’s not cheap to build a program that’s four times longer than the average accelerator. It’s not cheap to create a world-class group of industry leading mentors. It’s not cheap to connect a network of hundreds of SaaS founders through events worldwide. It’s not cheap, but when it comes to your business’ growth, it makes a big difference. That right there is an interesting position. So we do absolutely have people, whether it’s individuals or whether it’s other funds that are paying homage to our model, I wouldn’t say copy, but they’re paying homage to us. They will match or beat our offers, right? It’s like we make an offer and then they’re like, well, obviously I’ll give you a higher valuation because they have to. And yet we win almost all those deals. And why do you think that is? Because we are better, I believe, but because the public thinks we’re better because people who see TinySeed think, man, that is the gold standard or a gold standard like a world-class accelerator. And so the same thing applies to your SaaS, I think is what we’re, that was my long rant on positioning commoditization. This is something founders, I think some founders forget or they don’t pay attention to and they think price is the only factor and it’s not.  

Brendan Fortune:
No, the story is so important. The branding is, yeah, that is the power of the brand.  

Rob Walling:
Moving on to our next question, question number four. I find opinions tend to vary when it comes to how good product managers should be spending their time. Some seem to suggest talking with users is all you should ever do while others spend all their time project managing the engineers and still others interface mostly with marketing any good rules of thumb. So anytime anyone says always or never, I’m like, that’s definitely not the right answer. So if someone says they always talk to you’s just like, yeah, slow down there, or always project managing it is probably a mix. But what’s your take on this?  

Brendan Fortune:
Yeah, this is, I think part of the reason this question will never go away is because where good PMs focus their time changes depending on the projects that they’re working with and more importantly the team or teams that they’re working with. But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. So I do have a rule of thumb for this, which is as a pm I often like to ask, are you aiming or are you executing? And the question is intentionally I guess a little bit ambiguous. Oh, I’m just aiming, oh, I’m just executing. It’s always a little bit of a combo, which is right. But in general, product managers, the unique thing that product managers should be bringing to their teams is prioritization. They should be saying, this is an important problem that is both important for our customers to have solved, and if we solve it, we are going to make more money for it. 

However that happens, that is what product managers are uniquely there to do. So when you’re asking yourself, am I aiming more than executing or the other way around, you want the balance to be more in the favor of aiming than to executing. But aiming does not mean talking to users nonstop. As a matter of fact, that’s a problem. I think if that’s all that you’re doing, because as anyone who’s talked to a lot of customers knows at some point you start just hearing the same thing over and over and over and over again. So it’s not just talking to users, it is synthesizing information from lots of different streams. So some of that is talking to users, some of it is market anecdotes, maybe that’s like a competitor’s marketing or ad or press release or website or something, surveys, business metrics, product analytics and other problems and ideas that you might hear through your team no matter how small your internal team is. 

And synthesizing means sifting through all the noise. There is a lot of noise in any communication and looking for those common themes between what you’re hearing. And this brings me to one of my favorite points, and this is a trap I have fallen into many times myself. When you are synthesizing all of this information that you’re hearing that doesn’t happen alone in your own mind, and I think that’s a common myth. It happens with creatives too. Like authors of books or great musicians or performers, they kind of went off and into their zone, created this amazing art and then shipped it out to the world and it was just perfect right there. It’s rarely the case. And as a pm I think trying to retreat into your own mind, write a lot, maybe do a bunch of diagramming and stuff that rarely is going to help you synthesize. 

Instead what happens where that happens best in my experience is when you’re talking out a theory with another member of your team or a customer. So you’re saying, this is the pattern that I think I’m seeing and here’s why, dah, dah, dah, and then letting some questions come in about that from them and iterating based that input. So trying to have those conversations I think is super, super important. And I’ve got a tool called rock tumbling, which we won’t have time for, but if you’re a bigger customer with a larger PM team, it’s a really cool way to make this happen. One other kind of related point, and this is more for people that are working with product managers, even if it’s just one, I have encountered several times product managers, especially product leaders that will say something to me in a very confident and decisive way, this is the problem, this is the opportunity we need to go after and here’s why. 

And it doesn’t sound like a debate or an opportunity for curiosity. It sounds like an opportunity to fall in line and start taking action. And what I’ve learned time and time again is that a lot of times product managers are incentivized to sound this way because they don’t want to come across as wishy-washy and they want people to feel focused and they have clear direction and clear priorities, but actually they’re making it up kind of on the spot. They just get really, really good at communicating in a way that makes it sound like they’ve got it all figured out even when they don’t. So again, I tie this back to the whole synthesizing thing. It’s really important for any product manager or someone who’s deciding priorities to have conversations with others and get questions and challenges back because that is actually what the product manager or founder need. That’s what everyone needs to make better prioritization decisions. So don’t do it in a vacuum. And even if you do, you are tempted to present it in a confident way, ask for questions even if, does this sound right to you? What part of this doesn’t make sense? Could you repeat it back to me? Even depending on the partners that you have, try to iterate on it and not just steamroll everyone.  

Rob Walling:
That question and your answer actually dovetails nicely into our final question of the day, which is I’ve lately been using a SaaS product called Air Focus for managing our roadmap and user feedback. I like it, but I do like hearing more about how other PMs organize their planning and feedback.  

Brendan Fortune:
I’m going to try and refrain from Hot Takes on this one because I think product roadmap tools are really great and they’re also incredibly dangerous because they incentivize making a process. The goal, like the outcome, like following a process becomes the goal rather than making more durable prioritization decisions. But they do have their use. So what I’ve found is organizing user feedback, whether it’s an air focus or any other tool, there are many of ’em. It’s a great way to synthesize information for maybe the first quarter or two or maybe three when you’re immersing yourself in a new market that very little about or a new area of your product. Like going back to the drip example, if you were to expand into CRM, that might be a time to be a little bit more deliberate and organized with how you process feedback. But after a certain point, and that certain point comes pretty soon, there’s just severely diminishing returns to spending your time categorizing feedback. 

And what I mean by diminishing returns is your prioritization decisions. They don’t tend to get more accurate for all of the work that it takes to be like, I got this email. There are three pieces of feedback. Here’s where I’m going to categorize this. And tools that are around road mapping and organizing feedback often encourage you to go to that level of detail. So what I’d say is it’s more of a time thing. So use Air focus, use any of those tools. At first, I find a spreadsheet is about as good of a job. If it’s just about organizing the feedback, less so about presenting a roadmap visual, which actually brings me to the second point. Roadmaps are a fascinating topic because what the best roadmaps are lagging indicators or outputs of alignment with the team no matter how small that team is or how big the team is. 

So they’re not connections to your user feedback. It shouldn’t be the output of an equation where I’ve, okay, well I’ve got five high paying customers that requested this thing, therefore boom, it’s on the roadmap instead. It’s more about, again, communicating the alignment around this is a business opportunity that I think and members of my team are all in agreement, like in alignment, they’ve challenged it, they’ve had a chance to hear and discuss it. And so the roadmap is kind of inconsequential. It’s just a representation of what we’ve already talked about and decided. And tools like Air Focus, again, sometimes incentivize creating a roadmap document without those conversations because they tie it just directly into your user feedback organization and you can do that. But in my experience, where that tends to work is in organizations where you’re not being challenged and then I point back to my synthesis, you’re probably not going to be making the best prioritization decisions if you are making them in a vacuum just out of that organization. You’re going to make better decisions if you’re forced to build alignment with other people and not defend your decisions necessarily, but at least process them, rock tumble them. That’s the old Steve Jobs analogy of you want to bang them against something hard a little bit because they’ll be smoother. You’re going to get a better output if you allow them to be beaten up a bit. So in a nutshell, tools like Air Focus are great. I’ve never seen one that’s better than another personally, but don’t lean on ’em too heavily would be my recommendation.  

Rob Walling:
And I would be remiss if I did not mention TinySeed company savio@savio.io. Their H one is centralized, organize and prioritize, go to market team product feedback. So folks can also check that out if they are evaluating options. Brendan Fortune been quite the pleasure, man, having you back.  

Brendan Fortune:
Yeah, I love these questions.  

Rob Walling:
It’s a good questions. I know, and there were several others that we didn’t have time to answer today, but really enjoyed having you on the show. Again, folks want to keep up with you. They can search for your name on LinkedIn. We’ll obviously link that up in the show notes. That probably the best spot.  

Brendan Fortune:
Yes. Yep.  

Rob Walling:
Brendan Fortune, just like it sounds. Thanks again for coming on the show, man.  

Brendan Fortune:
Alright, thank you.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Brendan for coming on the show, and thank you for sending in your listener questions, whether you sent in the product focused questions that came for this episode, or you head to startups For the Rest Of Us dot com, click the ask a question link in the top nav. Your questions are what allows this podcast to feel more like a community, more like a living, breathing thing, rather than just me talking on the microphone every week as I’ve done for 15 years. And speaking of that, episode, one of this very podcast came out on March 30th, 2010. This is going live on March 25th, 2025, just a few days off from 15 years of shipping this podcast every week. If you keep listening, I’ll keep recording. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 767.